Lead AI Engineer

FDM is a global business and technology consultancy seeking a Lead AI Engineer to work for our client within the insurance sector. This is initially a 6-month contract with very good prospects to extend. The role will be based in London, with the workplace pattern and office attendance expectations are hyrbid.

You will lead the design, development and production delivery of AI and Generative AI applications, with a particular focus on large language models and Agentic AI. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role that will set standards for maintainable software, automated testing, secure integration and reliable operations while guiding an Agile engineering team.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design, development and deployment of AI and Generative AI applications, ensuring solutions follow the client’s software development lifecycle and engineering standards.
• Architect and build Agentic AI capabilities, including task, domain and orchestrator agents, memory, guardrails, orchestration and reusable tools.
• Establish modular software, API and backend engineering standards covering clean code, design patterns, validation, error handling, contracts, versioning and enterprise integration.
• Drive automated testing and delivery through unit, integration and end-to-end testing, AI evaluations, CI/CD pipelines, quality controls, repeatable deployments and rollback procedures.
• Lead secure and reliable production delivery, including access controls, secrets management, observability, performance, resilience, troubleshooting, Agile ceremonies and stakeholder alignment.

About You

• Extensive hands-on full-stack software engineering experience, with strong software design fundamentals and the ability to lead code reviews, refactoring and technical delivery.
• Deep experience developing Generative AI applications using RAG, prompt and context engineering, LLM APIs, Agentic AI orchestration and evaluation methods.
• Strong programming capability in Python, SQL and Node.js, with maintainable typed Python and JavaScript or TypeScript; React experience is desirable.
• Proven cloud-native and DevOps experience, preferably in Azure, using Git, Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Bicep.
• Strong experience with REST APIs, FastAPI or Express, relational and NoSQL databases, automated testing with tools such as pytest and Jest, secure coding, OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect, role-based access control and production observability.